Savannah Hauntings Video Series - Savannah Area Chamber of Commerce

2016 ACE: Grand Award

With live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, stately homes lining shady, park-like squares and centuries-old cemeteries strewn with stone monuments to residents passed, Savannah's Southern Gothic has long enticed and intrigued visitors. Savannah has been named "America's Most Haunted City," and people love to stay in this city's haunted inns, take ghost walking tours, hearse tours and trolley tours, and seek out some even more paranormal experiences. This video series allowed Visit Savannah to bring "America’s Most Haunted City" to life, so to speak. All of the locations featured are open to visitors to experience.

Synopsis:With live oaks dripping with Spanish moss, stately homes lining shady, park-like squares and centuries-old cemeteries strewn with stone monuments to residents passed, Savannah’s Southern Gothic has long enticed and intrigued visitors. Savannah has been named “America’s Most Haunted City,” and people love to stay in this city’s haunted inns, take ghost walking tours, hearse tours and trolley tours, and seek out some even more paranormal experiences. This video series allowed Visit Savannah to bring “America’s Most Haunted City” to life, so to speak. All of the locations featured are open to visitors to experience.

These are not your normal tourism videos! Savannah is a unique place brought to life through its ghost stories. The video series is differentiated in the marketplace by the black-and-white footage, well-crafted stories, voice over, sound and special effects. They are not simply video ads asking people to visit Savannah for its haunted experiences. Rather, our goal was engage listeners with the paranormal stories themselves. The call to action at the end of each video is asking the viewer “Been spooked in Savannah? Tell us your ghost story #VisitSavannah.”

Visit Savannah sought to take advantage of Facebook’s algorithm changes, which placed more emphasis on video and rewarded original video content with larger organic reach. Plus, video consumption on Facebook is growing exponentially, with more than 1 billion videos watched on the site every day.

The Savannah Hauntings video series was targeted to two primary audiences: Visit Savannah’s Facebook fan base (169,276 fans), and Facebook users in its target set.

Once posted, these videos appeared on the Visit Savannah page’s fan news feeds, where they can watch, like, comment and share the content easily. While YouTube serves millions of viewers every day, Visit Savannah has a comparatively small number of subscribers there. And most of the time, users need to seek out video content on YouTube by searching. The strategy was Facebook first.

Results

Total reach of the Facebook posts: 892,933+ (organic and paid)Total views on Facebook and YouTube: 481,907 (organic and paid)Total Likes: 9,599Total Comments: 1,838Total Shares: 2,661Budget/Video production cost: $15,000Budget: Facebook advertising: $2,625ROI: $0.017/per view for both production and advertising